Will the end of the Conservatives kill off the bonkbuster?

If you’re still wondering what 14 years of sleaze-filled Tory rule has done for the country, there is at least one reason to be cheerful – the revival of racy beach-reads in which sex-mad, bed-hopping MPs are caddish anti-heroes. We’ll miss them when they’re gone, says Joanne Ella Parsons

In ‘Cleavage’, former Tory aide Cleo Watson’s latest bonkbuster, the prime minister is nearly caught looking at the ‘Blue Balls and Bazookas’ website (Getty/iStock)

Don’t think too long or too hard about this – because, trust me, it’s not an image you’ll want in your head – but Conservative politicians are synonymous with sex. Whenever they are in government, Tory “sexploits” are routinely splashed across tabloids and broadsheets. As a class, they seem unable to resist an opportunity to highlight the gap between their party’s supposed traditional, family values and their extra-curricular bedroom activity.

So it is perhaps unsurprising that the Conservatives have a rich shared history with the bonkbuster. Because, just like the Tory party – with its associations in the public mind with privilege, pomposity and self-interest – the ruthless protagonists in these pacy and racy doorstopper novels, which are often read from behind sunglasses and next to a swimming pool while on a foreign holiday, like to bed-hop and wife-swap with exhausting frequency.

Rishi Sunak raised quizzical eyebrows after declaring he was a fan of Jilly Cooper, but is evidently so enamoured with her work that last year he slipped the queen of the bonkbuster an OBE for “services to literature”. Rivals, perhaps her most-thumbed and steamiest novel, and a bestseller in the Thatcher years, is shortly to appear as a miniseries on Disney+, with actor Alex Hassell as the roguish philandering Tory MP, Rupert Campbell-Black.

The current Conservative administration, whose 14 years in office have been fuelled by sex scandals, has begotten a new generation of bonkbuster writers, not least Boris Johnson’s former Downing Street aide, Cleo Watson. Her second bonktastic novel, Cleavage, has just hit bookshelves, with impeccable timing, days before polling day. In it, her fictional governing party is in crisis as a general election looms which they are almost certainly guaranteed to lose. We find out soon if it’s a case of art imitating political life.

The bonkbuster’s heyday was in the 1980s, when the Conservatives dominated the political landscape and Margaret Thatcher ruled over her party with an iron will and a smart handbag. While Alan Clark was lustily pursuing women and salivating over Thatcher’s most “sexually attractive” attributes – her “dainty ankles”, in case you were wondering – Cooper, Jackie Collins, Shirley Conran, Judith Krantz and many others were selling millions of books featuring women who wanted power and orgasms… and knew how to get both.

Cooper’s most famous lothario, Campbell-Black emerged out of this era drenched in potent and vigorous pheromones. Smooth, privileged, and with an ancestral country pile filled with old masters and randy grooms, he becomes a Tory MP in her second novel in the so-called Rutshire Chronicles (geddit?). Completely irresistible to any woman who crosses his path, Campbell-Black might be the super-shagging, and seemingly untouchable, politician of the Conservative Party’s dreams.

Once Thatcher left the scene, Tory sexual conquests descended into sleaze. In 1992, “minister of fun” David Mellor’s affair with Antonia de Sancha, prompted public revulsion and amusement with tales of toe-sucking and Chelsea football shirt-wearing sexual antics. When those lurid details turned out to have been invented by Max Clifford, the king of the kiss and tell, to please a tabloid editor, it would have been churlish to disapprove loudly.

In 1993, not to be beaten in the comedy stakes, John Major preached family values and the necessity of “self-discipline” despite having conducted an affair with a ministerial colleague, Edwina Currie. Perhaps inevitably, their liaisons became a foundation stone of her first Westminster bonkbuster, 1994’s A Parliamentary Affair.

Watson has been at pains to point out that her bonkbusters are entirely made up. Yet in the opening scene of Cleavage, the prime minister swiftly slaps his laptop shut to avoid being caught on the Blue Balls and Bazookas website. It’s an episode oddly reminiscent of former MP Neil Parish accidentally stumbling upon pornography while looking for tractors online during a Commons debate.

So, with talk of this election being a possible extinction-level event for the Conservatives, is the end also nigh for the bonkbuster?

Certainly, it would be no bad thing for the party’s entanglement with the genre to be over. The world of the bonkbuster is entertaining, titillating and salacious, but it is not one we should have to actually live in. Since Sunak entered Downing Street 18 months ago, with a promise to bring “integrity and accountability” to government, the number of Tory MPs to lose the whip over various alleged wrongdoings and misdemeanours continued to mount – to the point where those forced to sit as independents outnumbered the Liberal Democrats.

In this post-#MeToo era, Conservative sex scandals are not just moral failures. Matt Hancock’s fumble with his aide couldn’t be dismissed as “privileged boys being boys” when people were dying alone due to the Covid restrictions. It is somehow fitting that Johnson’s decision to make Chris Pincher his deputy chief whip, despite knowing there were sexual allegations against him, was the sex scandal that finally ended his premiership.

If you’re wondering what exactly 14 years of Tory rule have done for the country, the revival of the bonkbuster may be all there is. It will be interesting to see if the bonkbuster thrives in the Starmer era. Because while we might be desperately longing for our politicians to have a sense of moral duty and adhere to the same rules as the rest of us, it’s hardly sexy, is it?

Joanne Ella Parsons is a senior lecturer in English and creative writing at Falmouth University, and editor of a forthcoming essay collection, ‘Bonkbuster! Sex and Popular Romance from the 1950s to the Present Day’